“Sing Street” is not your typical coming of age film.

If you grew up watching MTV after school in the 80s and early 90s (like me), this movie will surely be a blast to watch.

Like Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused”, Cameron Crowe’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” or “Almost Famous”, the movie provides an authentic and entertaining time-capsule for teens of that period.

Eight years after making the charming “Once” starring Glen Hansard, Irish writer-producer John Carney released the wonderfully heartfelt movie “Sing Street” (2016) that captures the essence of how rock ‘n’ roll magically empowers teens to stand on their own two feet and loose themselves for the first time in passion. Starting with Elvis, then the Beatles, Stones and so on… each generation found their own flavor of music to fuel independence and teen fury.

The script is stellar. The dialogue is truffle-rich with one-liners (such as “No woman can actually be into a dude that likes Phil Collins.”) and classic 80’s scenes (such as when the dad scoffs at his teen sons that they are “no Beatles” while they watch Duran Duran intensely on MTV.)

My favorite scene is when Conor is hanging with his older brother in his room listening to records and talking music. This interface is a topic in many of my Music People Project interviews (click here)… “who influenced your musical taste most as a teen?”

“Sing Street” is also a movie for every teen that strummed a guitar in his or her bedroom filling spiral-bound notebooks with “deep” lyrics about the cool girl at school. I did the same, and can deeply relate to the scenes when the main character (Conor) repeatedly shows up at his bandmates house with his notebooks and says “wanna write a song”?

Having first hand experience with Catholic school and difference between the Christian Brothers and Jesuit Brothers, the scenes focused around school struck a connective bone.

Lastly, for those enamored with Lana Del Rey (like my oldest daughter)… it is not far-fetched to think Elizabeth Grant was inspired (maybe even copied) by the movie’s Raphina when creating her new persona (click here for that story). In fact, the script makes reference to the idea that pop is dead and replaced by “happy sad” music. I think I am on to something here.

I hope you enjoy the film as much as I did.

Visit Wikipedia (click here) to read more about the film, or just watch the movie trailer below.